Assuming that you have worked your way through the shop cleaning and organizing the workstations, you can begin looking to the next stage, which is stock and outsourced parts.
How often do you find your jobs being held up because you don’t have the drawer slides you need? How much money have you spent on overnight or express shipping because you don’t have the proper hinges on hand when you need them? And are your outsourced doors and drawer fronts arriving too late, or so early that you are tripping over them while you build boxes? Do you order more screws only to find an unopened or half full box the day after they arrive? It is time to seriously begin to get your ordering and stocking under control.
A big part of the entire Lean mentality is Just In Time production. Now as a cabinet shop, you don’t always have that much control over your vendors and suppliers, but you probably have a lot more than you currently exercise, and there is a lot of money that can be saved by taking that control.
The very first step is to get your on site hardware situation in hand. Are your hinges, hinge plates, drawer slides and the like organized, easy to find and accounted for? Do you know offhand how many 110 degree Eurohinges you have? If your assembler needs to get two special hinges for the corner cabinet he is building, can he go put his hands on them in a few seconds, or is a big hunt going to ensue?
A well organized and marked hardware station can dramatically reduce the time needed to assemble cabinets and get them to the loading dock. If your assembler wastes even 30 seconds per cabinet finding hardware, that’s 15 minutes per assembler for a simple 30 cabinet kitchen. And that’s assuming that everything he needs is on hand. If not, how much time will he waste looking before he decides that there are none, then goes to ask someone else? You’ve all seen this over and over.
With your hardware organized and accessible, it becomes much easier to track what is on hand and what needs to be ordered at the beginning of a job. And this idea brings us to the next stage of getting Lean, ordering hardware and outsourced parts in a timely manner.
Often, when working up a proposal, cabinet makers will work by lineal footage of countertops, or some other “packaged” method of costing. The drawback to this method is that you must not forget to go back and count the slides needed and order them ahead of time. You also need to delve into the cabinets and account for slides for any pullouts and such.
I typically recommend my clients keep an inventory of commonly used hardware, and order each job as a deposit is received. This helps keep the inventory under some control and makes job costing more accurate. You should be doing this with screws, dowels and other common fasteners too. You know how many cabinets are being built in a job, and roughly how many screws each cabinet uses. A simple spreadsheet can alert you to when you need to order more and again, let you track actual costs.
As you can see, we are working our way through your entire operation and tightening up your command and control of each aspect. Next installment, we will begin looking at the advantages to building cabinets in a single unit process, and how it helps in job costing.
